It is my habit each month to search the sites devoted to child advocacy and child well-being in order to discover and report on Who's Doing What That Works to make a difference in the lives of disadvantaged children in America.

The organization may focus on child poverty, child abuse and neglect, systemic foster care failures, health, education, or other areas. Its scope may be national or community-based. In every case, I am looking for “The Scorecard”-concrete, specific data on:

• How the organization gathers and communicates its successes and progress to its own constituents;
• How it reaches out to a broader public to demonstrate how their work touches at risk children and families and puts them on a better path;
• How they contribute to a sharing process on lessons learned—breaking down silos—creating hope for caring advocates everywhere—energizing people who have heard, too often, that the cause is almost hopeless.

This month, my search of sites took me to the advocacy organization, Citizens' Committee for Children of New York (CCC), where I found a Report on 60 Years of Progress, citing specific initiatives and real results from victories that make New York City a better place for children. It was indeed an impressive Scorecard.

I spoke to Jennifer March-Joly, Executive Director of CCC, and asked what the value of providing this service has been to CCC:

• Did supporters notice?
• Did it contribute to staff understanding of mission?
• Did it motivate staff?
• What were the outcomes overall?

Here are excerpts from her responses:

• “This was our first effort to pull together a concrete timeline and highlights of accomplishments throughout our history of documenting facts, educating the community, and advocating for change. ... The historical piece really provides a sound platform for where we go from here."

• “It was very well received by members of our Board and Advocacy Council-. For people who have been with us for decades, it was an acknowledgement of their hard work

• “For younger members, volunteers on both the Board and Advocacy Council, it was a way to ground them in a unique historic institution in New York and make them feel part of something larger."

• "And I think, for staff, it really helped tie them to our history and give them a sense of themselves as potential history-making agents.”

Because I have spent many years in relationship marketing, and began urging clients in the past decade to invest strongly in "Internal Marketing"—treating employees, stockholders, and all stakeholders as customers—I left our conversation confident that this model could improve outcomes for all nonprofits."

>>>Read more of the interview with Jennifer March-Joly.

>>>Learn more about how internal marketing can help nonprofits from Idealist.org.

About March-Joly: Jennifer March-Joly is the executive director of CCC. She is one of New York’s leading experts on child welfare, child care and the economic security of children and families, and an architect of the organization’s Securing Every Child’s Birthright campaign, an initiative to ensure that every child in New York is healthy, housed, educated and safe.

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Hershel Sarbin is the founder and publisher of our partner the Child Advocacy360 News Network and Editor at Large of Connect for Kids.

 

More from Hershel's conversation with Jennifer March-Joly:

Hershel: When you look at it short term, you’re going from year-to-year and citing those accomplishments, is there a sense in the organization that this really does impact clusters, significant clusters of individual kids in the city?

Jennifer: Our work takes almost two forms:

One, we have really aspirational work around how you ensure that every child is healthy, educated, and safe. And what are the very big-ticket or bold policy priorities that we need to advance over several years to make sure that we reach these goals?

So I’m thinking proper access to healthy affordable food; a tax policy that provides families with additional resources they need to keep their families intact and to thrive; a housing policy that would ensure that people of all income levels can live in New York and raise a family here. Those things are very big-ticket items that take years to accomplish.

Two, we have day-to-day work making sure that programs are high-quality, that they have the resources they need to maintain quality or expand capacity. And that programs that don’t work aren’t things that we continually fund. So that’s more of the nitty-gritty detailed work on the state and city level.

Hershel: Keeping Score-

Jennifer: Well, what I would say is, since we’ve started keeping track over a decade ago, what we do know is that the city has changed over time and we have made real progress in particular policy areas. Children’s health, for example, and early care and education. But what we’re also seeing is there are particular neighborhoods, children of color, and poor households that are really not benefiting from our successes across a whole host of areas to the extent that we would like.

So I think that while most of our advocacy is universal in nature, meaning that we focus on what all children need—clearly the beneficiaries of our work are the poorest households that have the greatest way to go in terms of making sure that they have everything that they need to thrive and do well here in New York City.

Hershel: In funding efforts, how do you express your deliverables?

Jennifer: We’re very explicit in our work about deliverables. We ask, What fact finding research are we going to do? What products are we going to produce, what policy outcomes do we hope to achieve, and how long do we think it’s going to take us to get there?

We’re not soft at all in terms of trying to define deliverables and outcomes.

I think the challenge is that things take time, so how do we maintain momentum and how do we keep elected and appointed officials that have the power to make change focused on the task at hand year in and year out, so we can secure those resources, or change that law, or augment that program?

That’s the challenge.
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